Nine gay public employees who successfully sued the state and the city of Anchorage to get benefits for their long-term partners still can't enroll them in their health plans or other essentials.
It's been two months since the Alaska Supreme Court unanimously ruled on the six-year-old lawsuit, saying the governments illegally discriminated when they offered benefits to employees' spouses but not to employees' long-term domestic partners.
And this helps to illustrate the frustrating dichotomy of my state. On the one hand we worship at the alter of Big Oil and seem to want to use up our natural resources as soon as possible. But from 1975 to 1990 it was legal to possess small quantities of marijuana for personal use, which is pretty liberal of us. We sometimes seem to suffer from a split personality disorder.
Some have blamed the influx of southern folk who arrived in the seventies and eighties to work on the pipeline and then just sort of took root. I don't know if it is that simple. It seems that I have been able to find people with strongly held opinions are either side of the ideological fence all of my life. We have some genuinely militant sorts living in the Matanuska valley, but I also vividly remember visiting a commune near the town of Palmer in 1972.
I do not expect our state to vote a Democrat for president anytime soon, but if the "letters to the editor" are any indication there are an awful lot of fed up voters looking for a number of changes in the coming elections. Should be a wild ride!
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Don't feed the trolls!
It just goes directly to their thighs.